


Sleeping Where They Fall

by codswallop



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 5+1, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Sleep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-20
Updated: 2011-03-20
Packaged: 2017-10-17 03:55:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/172634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/codswallop/pseuds/codswallop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some John/Lestrade cuteness for the kinkmeme. Prompt: Five times John and Greg fell asleep on the couch, and one time they actually made it to bed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleeping Where They Fall

1\. The first time John Watson and Greg Lestrade fell asleep together on the sofa, it was entirely accidental and entirely innocent. Almost entirely innocent. They’d been watching the match, drinking beer--and, all right, there’d been a bit of flirting, perhaps. But this thing they had going on was still very new, still very uncertain, and they were both so nervous they wound up drinking far too much beer and passing out before the match was over, slumped over opposite arms of the sofa.

Sherlock came in at two in the morning and found them that way, with the television now blaring infomercials. He shook John, who said “No,” very definitely without opening his eyes and then couldn’t be made to respond again at all. Poked Lestrade, who didn’t even twitch. Then he gave up, switched off the television set, threw the afghan over their entangled sock feet in the middle of the sofa, and went to bed.

 

2\. The second sofa night was also accidental but not at all innocent, and there was also beer involved--not nearly as much, though. They’d just solved a case--or rather, Sherlock had solved a case, but they’d both done a lot of running around after him for the past three or four nearly-sleepless nights. Sherlock crashed hard in his own bed when it was all over, and John invited Lestrade to raise a glass with him before calling it a night, by way of celebration.

They’d got well beyond the flirting stage by now, and before the beers were half-finished they’d been set aside in favour of kissing on the sofa, then groping, then lying-down groping, and then Lestrade’s hands were shaking with urgency as he grappled with John’s flies, desperate to get at the hardness beneath, to feel, to taste, to _suck_ \--

John shuddered and spasmed and tightened his fingers painfully in Lestrade’s hair, and then he went limp, still breathing hard. Lestrade sighed, and rubbed his face against John’s soft warm abdomen, kissing it, but John didn’t laugh or curl up or shove him away; John had fallen asleep.

Lestrade watched him for a bit, then put his head back down against John’s stomach, feeling its gentle rise and fall. He had every intention of getting up in just another minute and making John come to bed, but the next thing he knew it was broad daylight and his neck was stiff as all fuck and Sherlock was saying “Oh, _honestly_.”

 

3\. The third time it happened was at Lestrade’s place, on a night when Lestrade had fallen into a greyed-out doze in front of some crap historical drama on BBC1 and didn’t hear John let himself in. He startled awake at the sensation of cool fingers on his face. “Hey,” John said. “Sorry I’m so late. How are you feeling, any better?” His voice was too gentle, annoyingly gentle, sickening, really, and Lestrade wanted to tell him to get stuffed, wanted to say something sharp and clever back: _I’m feeling a lot like I’ve been repeatedly kicked and stabbed through the shoulder and then stitched up and doped to the gills on pain meds, so...about the same as yesterday, ta very much._

What he managed to say instead was something like “Mnph.”

“Yeah,” John said. “I figured. Want me to help you move to the bedroom? Might be more comfortable there.”

“Too far from the loo,” Lestrade grumbled. “And I like the telly on.”

“Right. Huh, I didn’t have you down as a Jane Austen fan, that’s...that’s very interesting, really, I’m intrigued.”

Lestrade gave him a two-fingered salute. “Like the noise. Voices. ’S nice.”

“Sure, okay. Well. Let’s do this, then, budge up just a tiny bit, like this--I know, sorry, sorry--”

The pain when he shifted made him hiss, but then he was settled again with his head in John’s lap, which was...good, to his surprise, really very good, just warm and nice and...good. John checked his stitches and gave him something cold and sweet to drink through a straw and then _petted_ him, strong fingers gentling the tension from pain-knotted muscles until he was boneless and floating. Murmured things, too, soothing, ridiculous things that ought to have been embarrassing and sick-making but weren’t, somehow. Perhaps because none of this was really happening to him, it was someone else, some soppy Jane Austen character, so it was okay, it didn’t matter...

He slept properly that night for the first time since the beating. John didn’t move from his post until morning, said he slept just fine, too, though Lestrade could tell from the way he hobbled to the toilet that he was lying through his teeth.

 

4\. The fourth time was only half a night, but it probably still counted. They’d gone to bed very late, on Lestrade’s insistence, because what more could they do at one in the morning, there was no sense exhausting themselves, they’d only be unable to function the next day. John had nodded, it was the sensible thing to do, yes, clearly, but when Lestrade woke at three-thirty-nine in the morning, John’s side of the bed was empty and cold. He got up and padded downstairs.

John’s face was greenish-pale in the light from the computer monitor. “Just checking my email again,” he said, glancing swiftly at Lestrade and then back at the screen. “And the website. Go back up, go to sleep, I’ll be there in a minute.”

Lestrade came over to him instead and waited, arms folded, until John sighed and got up and allowed himself to be led over to the sofa. “I should have made you take a sleeping pill,” Lestrade told him, pushing him down.

“No.” John shook his head. “What if anything-- No, I’d need to be able to wake up right away. It’s all right. Sleep is overrated.”

“Well, lie down at least.” Lestrade flopped down to recline against the sofa arm, pulling John in alongside him. “I’ll sleep. Maybe it’ll rub off on you, you’ll get some of my rest through osmosis.”

It was John’s restlessless that proved contagious, though.

“He’s _fine_ ,” Lestrade whispered eventually. “He does this. You know he does this. How many times has he done this?”

“I know,” John said, and then, a bit later, conversationally. “I’m going to kill him this time when he turns up. Literally, with my gun, shoot him dead. All right?”

“Sure. All right,” Lestrade agreed, but he was half asleep again when he said it, and the thought gave him strange, terrible dreams.

He woke to find Sherlock standing over the sofa like some great bloody _vampire_ , swaying a bit and looking down at them, at John, who had finally somehow managed to pass out. Lestrade tightened his arms around him a little, involuntarily, and John’s eyes flew open.

There was time to count the breaths, one, two, three, before the explosion.

 

5\. The fifth time started out with Lestrade on the sofa at 221B all by himself, but he wasn’t sleeping so much as flipping from side to side and waiting for dawn to come, wishing he could turn on the telly but not wanting to wake anyone else in the house.

Footsteps creaked on the stairs, and John shuffled through the room, head bowed and shoulders drooping. He went straight into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and cursed quietly. Lestrade heard the tap run for a minute and then shut off. More slipper-shuffling footsteps, back into the living room. Suddenly they halted, and John made a hushed exclamation of surprise. A moment later he crouched down next to Lestrade and touched his hair.

“Hi,” he said. “You’re still here.”

“I know,” said Lestrade. “I didn’t want to leave. Thought I might come back up, when I was done being upset.”

“Oh. I see, yeah. So are you done yet?”

“Nearly. I think.”

“Well,” said John. “Can I squash in with you here, then, while I wait?”

Lestrade made room. “Sorry I got upset,” he said, very low and muffled into John’s shoulderblade, a barely-audible vibration of an apology.

“I’m sorry you did, too. You do realise you were being ridiculous, though?”

Lestrade didn't answer. “It is a bit weird sometimes,” he pointed out. “I don’t want you not to care about him. Just.” He stopped. He wouldn’t say _what if he did want you that way_. He wouldn’t say _if you had to choose_.

“It’s just _different,_ ” John said, which he’d done before, and it still explained exactly nothing. “It’s an entirely different sort of-- Look, I know, I know I'm very greedy, but I do want you both. In your own ways. I know it's far too much to ask, certainly I don't deserve it, but--”

“Of course you do.” Lestrade frowned. “You deserve everything. I’m just a bastard sometimes, is all.”

“Mm-hm. Gorgeous bastard.” John turned his head and kissed him. “Also, _sane_. Which I appreciate more than I can possibly express. I do consider myself wildly lucky, you know.”

Lestrade wasn’t sure how he felt about being appreciated for his sanity. Relative sanity. It wasn’t as if it took much to beat Sherlock in that category. Still, if it got him here...

“Want to go back upstairs now?” he offered.

“No.” John yawned. “Comfortable here. Nice having you _close._ Bed gives you too much room to get away from me.”

“All right, then,” Lestrade said, so there they stayed.

 

+1. “Shift it, you.” Lestrade had got up to go to the loo while John went to the kitchen to pour them another round, and returned to find the sofa inexplicably full of Sherlock. “That’s our seat.”

“No,” said Sherlock, stretching out and kneading his toes against the sofa arm.

“Hey, move,” John told him, coming back in. “It’s only halftime!”

“No. Go to bed.” Sherlock didn’t lay, he lounged, he _lolled_. It was practically obscene.

“Pardon me?”

“You heard me. If you sit here drinking beer for another hour, one or both of you is going to fall asleep here, you won’t have sex, you’ll wake up with stiff backs and be cross for half the day. Inconvenient, annoying, unnecessary. Go to bed now and spare us all the misery.”

“The score’s tied!” Lestrade objected.

Sherlock cracked open one eye and glared briefly at the television screen. “The team in the red jerseys will lose,” he said. “Trust me.”

“Trust _you--_ ” Lestrade said, but John took his arm and began leading him away.

“It’s no use,” John told him. “He’s probably right, you know. About all of it.”

“That makes it _worse_ ,” Lestrade groused, following him up the stairs.

*

“What are you doing?” he asked John, a bit later.

John paused. “Sorry, that’s not obvious?”

“We’re not doing that _now_.” Lestrade stopped John’s hand from making any further inroads into the waistband of his pyjama bottoms. “I don’t have sex at the whim and order of Sherlock bloody Holmes.”

“Oh,” said John, and rolled over onto his back. “Right. We’ll just...go to sleep without having sex, then. That’ll show him.”

Lestrade turned away to face the wall. He held out for all of two minutes.

“All right, fine,” he said, turning back over and sliding his palm up inside the front of John's t-shirt. “Just to please you, though. I don’t intend to enjoy this at all.”

“No?” John kissed him, softly, and darted his tongue out to lick along the hard line of Lestrade’s obstinately closed mouth. "Not at all? That's a shame."

“Not in the least,” Lestrade murmured. He slid his hand higher, pressed his thumb against John’s right nipple, and John sucked in a sudden breath and squirmed against him, fitting their hips together.

“Sure about that?” John gasped. “Not enjoying it at all. Really?”

Lestrade rocked up against him, and John threw his head back and gave a stifled groan. “No more than absolutely necessary,” Lestrade amended, and bent to brush his lips against the long exposed line of John’s throat.

He debated, briefly, whether to try and make as little noise as possible--he loved watching John try not to make noise, white-knuckled, biting his lip, _desperate_ \--or to engage in the noisiest shag possible, purposely to annoy anyone who might be listening and rolling their eyes downstairs.

Inevitably, though, he forgot to care, forgot there was anyone downstairs to annoy, forgot that there _was_ a downstairs. Afterwards he sprawled across John’s limp body, sighing and sated, not even caring if John was laughing softly at him as they fell asleep.

*

When Lestrade stumbled downstairs and into the kitchen in search of coffee the next morning, he discovered that Sherlock had already installed himself at the table with his tea and toast. He was impeccably dressed at seven in the morning, his hair arranged in a crisp, smug halo of curls, and he brandished a copy of the morning paper, which blazed the news of Man U’s 2-1 defeat.

“Oh, I do enjoy being right,” Sherlock said, casting an appraising eye over Lestrade’s state of thorough dishevelment.

Lestrade grabbed the paper away and gave him a thwack on the back of the head with it, then tossed it back, grinning. “And I enjoy shagging your flatmate,” he said. “S’pose we both win.”


End file.
